I wanted to make an AboutBox that is as easy to use as the one that comes with Winforms. But, I also wanted to make use of some of the cool new UI capabilities in WPF and make it look a little snazzier than the default WinForms one… Below are the two different AboutBoxes: As you can see the...

I've been testing out some of the different possibilities in WPF with a sample AboutBox -- every program has one and they're not overly complex (so they make a good starting point). Also, for those of you WinForms-turned-WPF devs out there, you've probably noticed that there's no WPF equivalent of the...

It’s pretty easy to set up an XmlDataProvider as a resource in your WPF application. This lets you databind controls to XML data islands pretty easily. The following XAML puts an XML data island into my application. < Application.Resources > < XmlDataProvider x : Key ="aboutProvider" XPath...

I’m continuing to work through learning more about WPF and XAML. I was trying a simple dialog and noticed that it didn’t look like typical Windows dialogs… for example, all WPF windows have an icon, but if you look at dialogs in most apps (and what WinForms produces), they don’t have a visible icon and...

WPF doesn't have a built in LinkLabel control as you'd find in WinForms. But, I have found a couple of neat ways of doing one in WPF. The first was creating a new WPF control that derives from Label and then adds functionality to have it behave like a hyperlink. While this will certainly work, it's more...

I was just reading over some blogs and ran across a couple of interesting topics on usage and perf on an Immutable Collection in the .NET runtime. Turns out to have been written by an old friend and collegue - Jared . He's always written about some interesting topics and good to see that hasn't changed...

Been thinking about and looking at unit testing a lot recently. And, one of the items that came up was how do you test for expected exceptions to make sure that they're being thrown correctly. So, I wrote of few tests that did just that and noticed how similar they were, so I decided to create a helper...

There's been lots of WinForms and C# related content posted recently, and I have a list of things that I had meant to blog about, but never got around to. I'm going to post of list of some of these, so I can clear my backlog, keep track of them, and let other folks know about them... Priority Queue...

Chris Jackson has two posts about Gel Buttons that he's created for WinForms. They look really good and implement design-time support, so they're good examples on how to do that as well. Creating Gel Buttons With Window Forms: Part 1 Creating Gel Buttons With Window Forms: Part 2 Not sure...

Vivek has a project where he's written the interop layer to access the Windows shell's 'Open With' Dialog -- the one where you can associate a file extension with the application that should open it. It's a dialog that you may find useful in one of your applications, but isn't supported in the .NET libraries...

Here's a very cool sample that uses Managed DirectX to support input from the new XBox 360 controller in a simple Windows Form in C#. Paul Stubbs : MDX: XBOX 360 Controller Windows Forms Application [via Greg ]

I just ran into a problem doing this and found a great post about how to work around it. It appears that the MenuStrip doesn't support radio button items be default, but you can create a radio button effect by using the ToolStripMenuItem.Checked property and some drawing.

Earlier in the week, I posted about a project that implemented system tray support for .NET applications. That seems like a good project, but it's a bit complicated. I was just trying to add this functionality to an app that I've been playing around with, and I found another sources that has a more...

I posted earlier about using the My namespace in VS 2005 to create a single instance application in C#. You can also do a similar thing to use the My functionality for displaying a splash screen when your .NET application is loading. Here is Tyler's post on how to do this in VB, but if you include...

I saw these two posts on Greg's blogs, and they look very intriguing: FileHelpers and Screen Grabbing . These two libraries appear to be very useful - who doesn't need simplified file read/write functionality. And, the screen capture one is cool because it wraps some Win32 APIs for screen capture and...

Here's a link to sample code by Chris Szurgot for creating an application that can be placed on the system tray . It's become much more common to have things on the system tray recently, and this code allows you to implement this feature using .NET 2.0. I haven't had a chance to use the code yet,...

Developer.com has a great article on how to use Interators in C# 2.0 to reduce the amount of code you need to write to implement a class with IEnumerable. It use generics as well to make them type-specific. It's a good example of how C# 2.0 is trying to simplify coding tasks for developers.

I was back from Christmas and New Year's break at the start of the week. It was nice having an extended period of time off. Now, it's back to work and blogging. Here's a really good generic Tree<T> class that Peter Chen posted on The Code Project . It looks like a good implementation and shows...